will it render without shadows and FG?

the fix looks good tweety. I still think learning render layers was a "it all falls into place" moment for me. I think its the only way to render now, however i don't think you need to render...

did you render some separate geometry with a blue background and use PS to comp them?

its cool, but i think it still looks a bit over saturated.

well when you render a shadow pass it comes out black everytime... the thing you want is the alpha. thats why 2009 shadow passes confuse me.

the preset works fine, how did you comp it?

just create a new render layer, select everything and add it to the layer. name it shadow_pass or whatever. the easiest way from here is to go presets > shadow.
then render that.

taa daa :D

a shadow pass.

are these display layers you are talking about... usually render layers work on beauty, occlusion, shadow, reflection, diffuse (maybe) etc etc